Henri Rousseau

From "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck

The initial question in dealing with Rousseau s work is

thrust upon us: Is he a modern “primitive”?

Primitive' and 'naif' were used very early to describe

his work and found ready acceptance; recent esti-

mations of his work have tended to treat him as a painter

who cannot be separated from the evolution of modern art

by such glib and arbitrary classifications.

It is no slur to call Giotto and Cimabue “primitive”; it is

a means of locating them within two centuries which pre-

pare the formulation of the strict optical conventions of

Renaissance art. Rousseau reveals a comparable primitiv-

ism, for he strove in his conscious thinking about art to

achieve a naturalistic, academic style. He admired Bou-

•uereau and Ger6me and Courtois. Twentieth-century

Western art, however, the disgruntled offspring of a great

naturalistic tradition culminating in impressionism, was

seeking out the methods of primitives from Italv, Africa,

and contemporary Paris. Like Picasso and Braque and

Matisse and Delaunay, Rousseau worked not -with the op-

tical image (a rational transformation of what we see) but

with his personal beholding of things. He stood beside them

without having made the journev of styles which they had

made in their development as artists. He is primitive in

that, occupying the same ground as these men, he never—

teless looked yearningly toward a style they violently re-

jected. Robert Goldwater writes of this paradoxical situa-

tion:

But it is important to realize that the style which he

achieved was but a stopping place upon a road

along which he would have travelled further if he

could, and that the effect which he attains, seen

from the point of view of the mechanics and psy-

chology of its creation, is because of this intention,

even if it is in spite of it from the point of view of the sophisticated observer.

In other words, Rousseau was primitive in performance

but not. in intention. The distinction is accurate yet danger-

ous. What is usually described as his intention was really

his ambition—the desire to show in official Salons.

There remains one last preliminary: the technical prob

lem of dealing with Rousseau s work. First of all, forgeries.

Soon after his death, a profusion of counterfeit Rousseaus

appeared in Paris (and from as far away as Japan) per-

haps because counterfeiters believed a “primitive should

be easy to imitate.

As an artist, Rousseau, followed no steady evolution of

style, nor even a series of outwardly melodramatic reversals

like Picasso's. At his first Salon des Independants in 1886,

The year following his retirement at forty-one, Rousseau hung Un soir de carnaval, one of his masterpieces.

This canvas shows him already in command of his mature style.

In none of these compositions did he explore linear perspective;

we feel space as accumulation.

One stage does not flow logically out of the last, as we usually expect from an

artist . Along with their similarities, the paintings have a

discontinuous quality which suggests that .the order of their

execution is not a profoundly relevant factor. In addition,

uncertain dating of the bulk of Rousseau s canvases

makes chronological classification difficult.

We never find Rousseau isolating human features as a form of pure beauty

or expression. They appear in association with appropriate land-

scape or fragments of ordinary life.There was nothing casual

about the name he gave this type o£ paintings which he

considered his discovery. In 1907, writing the judge in-

structions before his trial, he stated flatly. “I am the in-

ventor of the portrait-landscape;

In the Moi-meme portrait of 1890, Rousseau s figure stands boldly

and masterfully in the middle, except that he had some difficultv about length of leg and making

the feet rest solidly on the ground. As a result—and also because Rousseau's head is just on the

level of the free balloon-—the figure is itself to rise into the bright sky.

Without laboring over physical likeness, he expressed

character in a pose, or repose, of the whole body, in a selec-

tion of significant objects attached to the figure, and in a

meticulously painted background. He portrayed not an appearance but an environment.

Ever since Rembrandt, the intense portrayal of human

character has tended to eliminate the natural world as a

distraction. The face should tell all. Even the romantics

hesitated to paint a formally commissioned portrait out of

doors. Rousseau set his highly formal compositions against

pastoral or semipastoral backgrounds. His

refusal to separate portraiture from landscape and genre painting chara-

acterizes the “primitive” sensibility which sees a person and

le objects that surround him as a single entity. Rousseau treated his canvas as a surface upon

which to combine and relate the material parts of a person s life, rather than as a

means of dramaticallv isolating a face from all incidentals.